Singing in Tongues

Two song cycles by Liza Lim.

Lim, an Australian of Chinese descent, is known for her intricately sensuous scores.Credit Illustration by Victo Ngai

Liza Lim’s song cycle “Mother Tongue,” which the soprano Tony Arnold and members of the International Contemporary Ensemble performed at Miller Theatre earlier this month, begins in a kind of sonic jungle. A saxophonist clicks his keys; flutists growl into their mouthpieces; string players make shivery sounds by bowing at the bridge; a trumpeter manipulates a wah-wah mute; percussionists make noise with tom-toms, a rainstick, a steel drum, and a Thai gong, among other things. When the voice enters, it could be mistaken for an unusually breathy instrument, as a “t” is accentuated by a percussive snap of the tongue. The first line of the text, by the Australian poet Patricia Sykes, is in Finnish: “Tämä kieli jota vaalin,” or “This tongue I am cradling.” We seem to be listening to the birth of a language, or the birth of language itself.

“Mother Tongue,” which had its première in 2005, addresses the power of language to shape consciousness, and what is lost when languages die away. The subject is a personal one for Lim, who has roots in multiple worlds. Of Chinese descent, she was born in Perth, Australia, in 1966, but spent part of her childhood in Brunei. Now based in England, she holds a commanding position in international music, her intricately sensuous scores welcomed both at the Los Angeles Philharmonic and at German new-music festivals. Yet she shows an acute sensitivity to the local and particular, to voices on the margins of a smoothly integrated global culture. Living in Brisbane from 1997 to 2008, she gained knowledge of Australian indigenous culture from her next-door neighbors, and she has drawn on various other East Asian traditions. In her work, rough, plain melodies meet up with displays of avant-garde virtuosity; voices sing and squawk, instruments emit pure tones and raw noise. Lim exemplifies a younger generation of composers who have revivified modernism by kicking away its technocratic façade and heightening its visceral power.

Sykes’s texts for “Mother Tongue” are mainly in English, but are interspersed with words from other languages, several of them nearly extinct. One passage includes phrases in the N/u dialect of South Africa, the Nüshu dialect of Hunan, Navajo, the Warlpiri language of Australia, and Finnish, all of them playing on ideas of mothers, mothering, sisterhood, and the mother tongue: “Love songs are breeding in the abdomens / and every tongue bathes in every other tongue: xanki=khoake, Jiebai Zimei, Shimá, mampu-mani, äidinkieli.” What’s striking about Lim’s treatment of these words is how they blend into a multilingual whole. There is no demarcation between the familiar and the exotic: whether in English or in Warlpiri, the vocal line maintains an unpredictable, spastic energy, as consonants are repeated in stuttering patterns and vowels are prolonged. English winds up sounding like an endangered indigenous dialect, which is surely Lim’s point: every language, no matter how universal, began as the urgent messages of a tribe.

The piece follows an arc from complexity to simplicity, from collective argument to solitary song. The first notes, in the baritone sax and the double bass, are F and A-flat; you hardly notice them amid the initial melee, but they become ever more prominent as the work proceeds, hinting at a tonal center. At the beginning of the third, and final, section, “Longitude of Loss,” the soprano, adopting what the score describes as a “folk-like style,” warbles an ancient-sounding melody; at the same time, she draws two bows across a cello that has been retuned to the notes F and A-flat. This is the interval of the minor third, and by the end it has created a mood of lamentation. Having evoked the origins of language, Lim suggests, at the close, a language becoming extinct. “I am hanging by my mother tongue,” the soprano declares, in a long, lonely melisma. Arnold, at the close of a swirling, almost shamanistic performance at Miller, brought to mind a village elder singing into a tape recorder, the last master of her tongue.

There are many such moments of blunt lucidity in Lim’s output, as masks of urban sophistication fall away. It would be a mistake, though, to see her as a multicultural optimist, hosting a kind of block party of world traditions in the name of global-village platitudes. When she approaches far-flung traditions, she does so with extraordinary care, aware of how a composer trained in European classical music can come across as a high-minded tourist. Rather than asserting authority over her materials, she has a way of letting them speak for themselves, even as she maintains narrative momentum. And her cross-cultural encounters are never without tension. All this is evident in “Mother Tongue” and, even more, in “Tongue of the Invisible,” an hour-long vocal-instrumental work that Lim completed in 2011, and that the British baritone Omar Ebrahim and the German group Ensemble musikFabrik recently recorded for the Wergo label. One is tempted to call the composition a masterpiece, except that the word seems too egotistical for an artist so keen on collaboration and so attuned to the experiences of others.

Lim here turns her gaze to the Middle East, where multiculturalism meets its nemesis. “Tongue of the Invisible” is based on the poetry of the fourteenth-century Persian mystic Hāfez, who blended the sacred and the profane in scenes of ambiguous rapture. Lim confronts a majestic tradition that few people outside of Iran can claim to know. Her response is not to mimic Persian sounds directly but to set up an open-ended structure in which performers alternate between playing precisely notated sequences and improvising on given themes, in a nod to the double nature of Persian classical practice. Furthermore, the psychic pressure of improvisation is intended to capture the mystical heat at the core of Hāfez’s poetry—the frenzy of Sufi rites.

In the first of eight movements, the oboe and the violin present overlapping solos, each moving at its own pace while the rest of the ensemble—seventeen players in all—drones, shimmers, and writhes around them. The music recalls the introduction to “The Rite of Spring,” where lush instrumental vines proliferate and intertwine. The baritone, meanwhile, sings “Welcome! Drink! Drink boldly!” His delivery, wavering between speech and song, suggests both spiritual and physical intoxication. Later, there is a miniature concerto for oboe, with off-the-cuff commentaries by other musicians, and an entirely improvised movement for solo piano. On the Wergo recording, the pianist is the jazz composer and bandleader Uri Caine, who brings his own incisive, spidery technique to bear. The members of musikFabrik, perhaps the most riotously inventive ensemble on the modern scene, keep pace with Caine while Ebrahim provides an impassioned center.

At the heart of the cycle is a brief, gossamer-textured movement on a particularly haunting Hāfez text (Lim sets English translations by Jonathan Holmes):

The rose flowers for a day only

Before the bud is pressed

Between the pages of the world

As Ebrahim sings downward-sighing phrases over fragrant harmonies reminiscent of Debussy, Lim seems in danger of losing her modernist credentials. But no sooner have we settled into this magic garden of sound than it vanishes, and the violent tangle of instruments resumes. As in the “Rite” or Berg’s “Wozzeck,” collisions of extremes give us a fuller, more honest picture of a fractured world. In the end, the mother tongue is the music itself, radically fluid and changeable, mediating between one language and another. ♦

Alex Ross has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1993, and he became the magazine’s music critic in 1996.